Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/205

 BONTECOU

BOTSFORD

and to afford the doctor twenty years later the satisfaction of confirming by autopsy his or ginal diagnosis. He made the first resection of the shoulder-joint (1861) and of the knee-joint (1863) for gunshot wounds and practised exten- sively excision of the fractured ends of long bones; modified Pirigoff's operation on the foot.

April 13, 1S61 he enlisted in the Civil War as surgeon, Second Regiment, New York State Volunteers, with rank of major and operated on the field at Big Bethel, the first battle of the war. From October, 1S63, to June, 1866, he was surgeon in charge of United States Army General Hospital, "Harewood," at Washington, District of Columbia, one of the largest hospitals of the war, with capacity of 3,000 beds.

On November 21, 1S57, while in charge of the Troy Hospital he ligated the right subclavian artery for diffuse traumatic aneurysm of the axillary artery, the first successful case in America and one of the first three on record.

Brevetted lieutenant colonel and col- onel of United States Volunteers, March 13, 1S65, he resumed private practice in Troy in 1866. For many years he was attending surgeon at Watervliet Arsenal, West Troy, and attending physician and operating sur- geon for twenty years at Marshall's Infirmary, Troy, where he made the first operation in this country and the second in the world for typhoidal per- foration.

lie was a member of the Rensselaer County Medical Soc ety, Medical Society of the State of New York, New York State Medical Association, charter mem- ber and fellow, American Surgical As- sociation, 1887.

He married, in 1847, Miss Susan Northrup of New Haven, Connecticut, and had five children.

Personally a vigorous and handsome man of genial temperament and great originality, he was an indefatigable worker and constant student of his pro- fession, keeping himself abreast of its

advances, and covering in his sixty years of practice an immense field of activity and achievement. A healer by instinct and a brilliant surgeon, he was a natura- list by taste and early training. He travelled extensively, and his mind, rich with wisdom and broadened by varied tastes and vast experience, was a store- house for all who knew him, and Lincoln Steffens, the publicist, said of him, "He will go down to history, I suppose, as a great doctor, and yet, what is really so much more to the point is that he was so great a man."

He died in Troy, New York, March 27, 1907. R. B. B.

Botsford, Le Baron (1812-1888).

The Botsfords were an old family who emigrated from Leicestershire, Eng- land to Newton, Connecticut, where they became both eminent and wealthy. Amos Botsford, the grandfather of Le Baron, graduated at Yale in 1763 and was a tutor at the college in 176S, when he espoused the royalist cause. At the conclusion of the war of Independence, he with five hundred other loyalists sailed from New York for Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and he finally settled in Westmoreland County, New Brunswick. His son William, the father of Le Baron, graduated at Yale and studied law, afterwards being made a judge of the supreme court.

Le Baron was born in Westmoreland County, New Brunswick in 1S12, and commenced studying medicine in Glas- gow in 1831, graduating there in 1835. After practising four years in Wood- stock, New Brunswick, he removed to St. John, where he remained until his death in 18SS.

In 1854 a terrible epidemic of cholera broke out in St. John, in which fifteen hundred persons perished. During its prevalence Dr. Botsford stuck to his post, and was unremitting in his atten- tions to all classes and his strong phy- sique enabled him to come through the ordeal unscathed. He was a man over six feet and had a fine prepossessing